Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Open Studios: Hunter's Point Shipyard

Today we went to Hunter's Point Shipyard Open Studios. This is a chance for local artists to exhibit their work to the public. Open Studios moves to different neighborhoods of San Francisco and different towns around the Bay Area. This was our first visit with an Open Studio and we had a great time talking to different artists.

If you are interested in Open Studios or exploring the artists we interviewed in more depth click here.

Rab Terry

The first artist we interviewed was a man named Rab Terry. Rab moved into the Hunter’s Point Shipyard studios because of his friend who had a business there, and decided it would be a good place to make and showcase his art. At one point he claimed he only paid $200 for the entire basement per month, but now since the city has taken over the Shipyard, the rate has increased exponentially. The work place is good, for it allows him to make a mess, which is what he needs to make his art. Terry’s panels take a lot of work for he builds them, then applies colored plaster, and then sands them down to make them appear as he wants.

The overall affect is a misty, almost cloud like blocks of color.

Terry realizes that his art is not extremely out there, but he realizes that it is what people want for their homes.

Rab Terry’s work is showed through out the US and in his gallery in San Francisco, Sudio Gallery.

Celeste Chin is an artist who embodies a true artist mentality when she says, “I don’t give a shit about selling while I’m alive.” Through out her career she’s realized that you can’t spend your whole life trying to make money, and if you do, being an artist isn’t the career for you. To make money, Chin claims, you have to be making what people want to buy, and that doesn’t always match with what you want to make. Chin for example creates art in order to create more than just a pretty picture; she creates it to make a statement. In all of her artwork, she tries to look for wild areas from nature still remaining in the city in order to remind people of what they don’t normally see.

We loved Chin’s art mainly because of her environmental implications and her unique color blocks on the outer edges of her paintings. Chin embodies her own environmental opinions by not wasting any paint. All of her extra paint she puts into a bar of colored squares on one side of her painting. This also is ideal because it sets her landscapes apart from other artists’ landscapes.

Ed Handelman has lived through a lot because he is a Korean War Veteran, which has manifested in his arts. When he started he, “wanted to make it big,” but now just has the goal of getting up to paint every day.

Most of his paintings included the vague outline of a person, with either dripping or exploding colors coming from the silhouette. Knowing Handelman’s biography of being a war veteran, helps bring his art to life. The vague silhouette parallels the lack of identity a soldier has in the military. The contrast between the silhouette and the background shows the contrast between conformity in the military and the desire to express one’s individuality. The splashes and

drips of bright colors is reminiscent of blood and wounds that would be gotten on the battlefield. Handelman blends the silhouette and the drips of color to show that a warrior is never capable of forgetting their wounds, and the horrors of war will forever be imprinted on the soldiers.